6 Web Design Trends to Watch Out for in 2017

The Web Design industry was one of the fastest growing industries of 2016, which saw some big web design trends making way for unconventional design movements that have been predicted to make a great impact on how new-age web and mobile applications are going to work in 2017.
Read on to find out which technologies, designers, and executives are betting on in web design in 2017. (Also, check out our new certification course in Graphic Design and UX designed to help you build best-in-class web designs of today.)

Web Design Trends 2017

1. Mobile Interface Like-Design for Web Applications

UX designers, after deep study, have come to a conclusion that winning user acceptance will still be a crucial aspect of trying to sell products or services over the Internet that will be achieved by making web applications that will, speaking stylistically, look more like a mobile app’s interface: minimalist designs that easy to follow.
With more users switching to smaller mobile screens for accessing websites, that are now anyway being designed to be rendered in mobile browsers, companies need to ensure that the design for web and mobile apps remain more-or-less consistent across devices.
It’s unwise to make users work through a new interface each time they log into a website from a different device.
Google search engine recognized this trend and has already made a noticeable change this year: it removed ads from the right-hand side of desktop search results worldwide, and the industry is following it too. Now the ads will be featured only on the top and bottom of the page.
This little tweak in the layout, that Google says has been testing since 2010, now makes the desktop and mobile search results more similar.

2. Age-Responsive Design

Responsive web design (adapting a website’s layout to a wide range of devices) was what every designer was gunning for the past many years. Come 2017, designers are now experimenting with something new: the age-responsive design, which is the process of adapting a website’s layout and content to different age groups!
UX designers feel that this was only a natural progression to the way the user traffic has been diversifying lately. Web sites should no longer only subscribe to the philosophy of “one size fits all.” Based on the metadata obtained, it was easy for UX designers to map out visitors’ age groups that helped UI designers construct a stripped-down version of their existing interfaces, wherein, features like font sizes and the spaces between the words were modified to cater to a large set of ages.
Now, font sizes are being increased to accommodate the eyesight of elderly visitors, or font colors have been changed to colors that would help the colorblind perceive a website better. A lot more changes are being increasingly brought in to help with a sophisticated design approach.

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3. Conversational UX

With chatbots increasingly crawling the web, the growth of automated messaging platforms is bound to grow, and it is clear that it will have the biggest role to play in the future of UX. Siri and Google Assistant have clearly become more than a fad and are actually assisting masses in ways that couldn’t be thought of before this time.
Soon, the chatbots will open many new opportunities to interact with users in more than just the “submit your query” way. This will be a new challenge for UX designers, as the process of integrating chatbots into pages will be challenging, but will be one step ahead into bringing bleeding-edge technology to web designs.
Though, as for now, none of the AI solutions that exist in the market are very good with learning the context of the user’s chat. Those that exist rely on a pre-fed database of answers to the commonly asked questions. There’s still some way to go in terms of the possibility of having an intelligent exchange of conversation between a chatbot and an end-user, but with IBM’s Watson evolving at a rapid pace, this seems quite plausible.
Though personalization of chatbots hasn’t impacted our lives that strongly yet, but we sure have our toe in it already. Chatbot technology is starting to get integrated into consumer apps. Now, there are apps that allow customers to order pizzas through artificial conversational interfaces. This technology, though still in its infancy, is bound to emerge on other platforms and become a norm soon.
For example, we may soon see chatbots operating in retail banking. The days of waiting for a customer representative to show up on the other side of the line may soon be over. We will be able to connect with AI representatives through our devices to report things like lost cards, among other routine things. The chatbots could also be customized to include other advanced, holistic portfolio analysis, like the “what-if” scenarios.
And, how cool will it be to have an AI-powered internet provider customer service rep that will know everything about your router’s setup and will be able to fix your connection within hours even in the small hours of the morning!
These changes can be integrated into the back-end of a mobile app and can then be made to transcend into the user experience. Conversational interfaces advanced notification systems are here to stay.

4. User Experience and Designing of Mobile Apps Will Go Hand in Hand

2017 will be the year of the designer. Visualization-based tools will empower designers in the app development process; designers will now be able to produce prototypes that will be more than just the screen flicking types that will go to a great extent in helping a stakeholder understand better how an application will actually run when it’s finished. Basically, the designers will get to have a greater say in the mobile app development process.

5. Virtual and Augmented Reality Extensions for Mobile Devices

Artificial Intelligence and augmented reality/virtual reality will be big in 2017. More experiences will be designed without the need of a traditional screen at all!
Field Services, let’s say, those offered by real estate salespersons will be complemented with robust image recognition technology that will stem from advanced mobile backend services. An app has already been developed for VR-assisted real estate tours. This sure helps cut a lot of money for both the parties, the agents and the customers.

Sotheby’s real estate agents are using VR to sell homes in LA and NYC

Image courtesy: Fortune.com

We expect this web design trend to emerge in other fields as well, and medicine is our biggest bet. Imagine a doctor performing your surgery using VR glasses that display real-time vitals streaming in from an app. They won’t have to turn around to get a look at the monitor when trying really hard to get through a tricky spot between your ribs!

6. Improved Design Compatibility

Historically, UI designers were expected to navigate through dozens of devices and create multiple designs for each platform (some designers have claimed to do over 50 versions!). It then came down to the engineer to interpret these multiple designs and apply them to new platforms by painstakingly translating the code, in effect, stretching timeless, creating inconsistencies, and resulting in poor quality.
2017 will see an improvement in tools that will help smoothen out this process by providing design systems engineered to simplifying multi-device collaboration, creating scalable componentry, and automating the previously done manual process of design collaboration. These systems are also equipped with handy tools like art boards and symbols that will be connected to code components beforehand.
With such roadblocks out of the way, designers will get more time to think about the expectations of the end-users, rather than starting from scratch every time.
Make the most out of these emerging web design trends and get working real quick!
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2 Comments

Nice artical it was very good information for developers if The Web Design industry was one of the fastest growing industries of 2016, which saw some big web design trends making way for unconventional design movements that have been predicted to make a great impact on how new-age web and mobile applications are going to work in 2017.